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> > I am talking about working tech writers working with the available
> > tools, but realizing that there are strong forces at work pushing us
> > toward tools that read and write XML. I believe that as users of these
> > tools we should in turn push the tool vendors (especially Microsoft and
> > Adobe) toward achieving this end.
And then Andrew replied:
> Word 2000 and XP already can output XML. Its one of many formats it
> supports. I don't believe Frame does - but its been a while since I have
> used Frame.
Both of these posts perpetuate a misunderstanding of XML because they both
imply (unintentionally, I presume) that XML is a file format. It is not.
There's no need to push tool vendors to make tools that "read and write XML"
because they already make them. And that includes Word, Frame and, for that
matter, Notepad! This is because the format of an XML document is plain
ASCII text. Hence, any tool that can open a plain text file and "save as"
plain text can "read and write XML".
XML is not a file format in itself, like ASCII, RTF. postscript, or the
proprietary formats of Word or Frame. XML is a family of markup languages
within the broader family of SGML. With the possible exception of XHTML, XML
languages are designed to tag information in ways that having nothing to do
with the formatting of the information. While a formatting language, like
HTML or RTF, would include formatting tags like <bold> <end_bold>, XML would
tag information according to what kind of information it is: e.g.,
<part_number> <end_part_number> or <price> <end_price>.
When you open an RTF document in Word, Word will suppress the RTF tags (like
the bold tags) and make what comes between them bold (or whatever). Word
reads and processes the tags.
But an XML tool doesn't work like that, nor is its supposed to. It does not
suppress the XML tags, nor does it do much of anything to the presentation
of what comes between the tags. That's not the idea of an XML tool.
An XML tool is an application that primarily does two things (1) makes the
tags easy to distinguish from the content, usually by giving them a
different color or indentation from the content, and (2) makes it easy to
insert tags with a few clicks, so that they don't have to be manually typed.
It may or may not also include other features, such as the ability to verify
that a document conforms to the XML language it is intended to use.
(Remember XML is a family of languages.)
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